Pac’s former manager claims Suge controlled his funds
The late 2Pac is one of the best-selling rappers of all time, and a good portion of the sales were garnered while he was still alive. However, Leila Steinberg, Pac’s first manager at the height of his career, claims the iconic rhymer earned little out of the hundreds of millions made from his sales.
In an interview with Allison Kugel, Steinberg said Suge Knight and his Death Row entity offered Pac a bad deal and ended up bagging large percent of his income. “I don’t think, I know Tupac was exploited financially,” Steinberg explained. “I witnessed it. I witnessed the direction of his career and the power people that didn’t want to hear my voice or my resistance. I did choose to stop managing him, but I stayed close and there were people making a ton of money from the beginning of his career until the end of his career.
“Back then, if you were an artist in the early ‘90s, you got an eight to 12 point deal. Points are percentages (one point is equal to one percent), so if you look at a pie and you look at 100 percent, back then with CDs selling for $15, a piece and you sell a million, and he sold a lot more than that. Just look at the numbers. Let’s say he got 12 points. You pay your producer four of those 12, your manager. You really walk away with what? Four or five points of your 100. That was typical, and we’re still talking about the exploitation, primarily of people of color.”
She continued, “Tupac did make some money, but he didn’t have access to it. At the end, Suge controlled all of it. Millions we made. Tupac did own some houses. He saw a million, but what’s a million? It’s crumbs. There were hundreds of millions made off of Tupac. There are people who own homes and property now off of Tupac money, and it’s not those of us that were there grinding and working,”
